2008/7/23 Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org:
This feature was inspired by a meeting with White Cat at Wikimania, seeing the terrible conditions his bots are forced to work under, shoulder to shoulder in 15 tiled command prompt windows, fixing double redirects all day and all night, working their poor little fingers to the bone. It was very sad.
Not to mention that these bots were forced to run in cmd.exe shells. Sad, indeed :(
If not running 24/7 scanning for Special:Doubleredirects, bot owners are used to run pywikipedia' double redirect fixer on each new XML dump of their project (real time bots were processing less double redirects than created, thus leaving a quite big number of double redirects to fix afterwards). I'll be looking forward at the data dumped after the activation of this feature on the WM sites: the number of "surviving" double redirects should be greatly reduced.